The singularity has nothing to do with consciousness.

Its really important to understand the difference between sentience and consciousness, which are important for human beings.

There are lots of companies that are really trying to collect as much information as they can about every single person on the planet because they think its going to be valuable and it probably already is valuable.

No one has a clue how to build a conscious machine, at all. We have less clue about how to do that than we have about build a faster-than-light spaceship.

Some PhD physicists write software or work for hedge funds, but physics still has a problem with having very smart people but not enough opportunities.

It's very hard to predict what kind of uses we'd make of assistants that could read and understand all the information the human race has ever generated. It could be really transformational.

Leg locomotion was, for decades, thought to be an incredibly difficult problem. There has been very, very painstakingly slow progress there, and robots that essentially lumbered along at one step every 15 seconds and occasionally fell over.